It sounds difficult, but there are other ways to test your breath than breathing into your cupped hands. Because our mouth is joined to our noses (or nasal canal) through a connecting palate anything we smell from our mouth goes straight through to the nose. The problem is, we can’t actually smell our mouth from our nasal canal. Somebody neglected to add that function to the human body, we’ll let it slide.
So the question is – How can we smell our own breath ?
One way is indirect smelling.
This is done by licking your wrist and waiting for it to dry a bit, then smell it. This is a good indication of how the tip of our tongue smells. Make sure you smell your wrist first and then lick it and smell it again, just so you can differentiate between any hidden smells from your skin. You may not smell anything if you don’t suffer from chronic breath issues because this part of our tongue generally isn’t the culprit.
Second way is the Spoon Trick
Go to your kitchen draw and take a spoon out. Place the spoon upside down and put it at the back of your tongue. Moving it forward in a sweeping motion. The aim being to ‘scrape’ off the smell. Don’t go too deep – you may find out what your stomach contents smell like.
Lets now have a look at this little specimen you have got on your spoon.
What is the colour like ? It may be clear and liquid. However it can come in the appearance of yellow, white or brown ‘fluffy goo’. As a general rule, the lighter the better, the darker the worse – in terms of odor.
How does it Smell ? If you are brave enough, bring it up to your nose and take a whiff.This is how your breath smells to other people! As mentioned earlier, the nasty bacteria generally sits at the back of your tongue.
Lastly – The Gauze Test.
This test is much like the Spoon test but using gauze. Neither one is better than the other, just a different way of performing the test. Dentists quite often use this to educate their patients, it’s not quite right getting out a spoon and scraping their clients mouth. Gauze is much more professional.
You can pick up some medical gauze from you local Pharmacy. Poke your tongue out in front of a mirror and see if you can find any coloured coating on it. Make sure you look right back, this is where it will be hiding. Once you locate it, get the gauze and use the same motion as you did with the spoon. When you have your specimen – inspect it the same way you did with the spoon.
